March 18, 2026

How Dental Insurance AR Gets “Cleaned” Without Getting Collected

31 minutes

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Your insurance AR report can look perfect while your practice quietly bleeds money. I’m Erica Aguilar, and I’m pulling back the curtain on the uncomfortable truth: “clean” dental insurance accounts receivable can be manufactured, and the prettiest numbers on your aging report might be the biggest warning sign.

We walk through a real-world story of “Biller Betty” and the fast moves that make an insurance AR cleanup look successful without improving collections at all. I explain the three biggest red flags I see in dental billing and revenue cycle management: heavy adjustments disguised as contractual write-offs, shifting denied balances to patient responsibility instead of appealing, and deleting then recreating claims to make them look fresh. That last one is especially dangerous because it wipes out your original claim submission date, weakens your prompt pay position, and can trigger timely filing problems.

Then we get practical. I share the performance percentages I want you monitoring so you can run your billing department like a business: what healthy 0 to 30 day insurance AR can look like, how to keep older buckets from getting heavy, and how to audit any “cleanup” by separating what was actually collected from what was adjusted or shifted. We also talk denial strategy, appeals, when to involve the insurance commissioner, and the 24-hour, 48-hour, and seven-day follow-up system that prevents claims from aging just because they never truly landed on file.

If this helped you, subscribe, share the episode with a practice owner or biller, and leave a review so more teams stop trusting “clean AR” and start measuring real performance.

Would you like to set-up a billing consultation with Ericka? She would love the opportunity to discuss your billing questions. This a no pressure, no fluff, conversation about what is going on in your billing department. And it is a gift to you for supporting the podcast!

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